Well, do take your Bibles and turn with me to John chapter 1. This is the first of an Advent series looking at this great introduction to the Christian faith that John writes. Sherlock Holmes, of course, is a famous detective, accompanied always by his dear sidekick, Dr. Watson. They were camping together in a forest one night. They'd gone to bed and had fallen asleep when Holmes wakened Watson up. He said to Watson, Watson, I want you to look up and tell me what you see. Watson, who was used to being put on the spot by Sherlock Holmes and asked questions that seemed on the surface to be insignificant, but were far deeper than they appeared, thought he'd better be careful in what he said. He said, as I look up, I see the branches of the trees above me and beyond them I see a beautiful night sky with lots of stars and a beautiful full moon. And what does that tell you? Holmes asked Watson. Oh, this could be difficult. So he said, well, it tells me, from an astronomical point of view, it tells me how big the universe is. All those millions of stars representing millions of galaxies in the night sky and the moon, bright and shining, reminds us of the planets that circle many of these, in these galaxies. What else does it tell you? Asked Holmes. Well, if I was thinking theologically, I would have to say, of course, that the heavens declare the glory of God. And what else does it tell you, Hans Holmes? Well, there's a full moon, there's a clear sky, it's probably going to be a lovely day tomorrow. What does it tell you, Holmes? Holmes said, it tells me that someone has stolen our tent. Sometimes it is a mark of the greatest minds that they start further back than the rest of us do. And we find this happening here when John is recalling the ministry of Jesus Christ. Where do you begin? Where do you begin talking about Jesus? Well, we know that some of the gospel writers, you think of Mark, for example, he begins like this, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and immediately launches out into Jesus' public ministry when he is a man in his thirties. Other writers, they start a little further back than that. Matthew, for example, starts with the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem. Luke, Well, he goes back further. He goes back about a year before Jesus is born, to announcement to his cousin's parents, and then to the announcement nine months before he's born to his mother. Or we could start further back than that. We could roll the clock back, back in time, perhaps 800 years before Jesus, to the prophet Isaiah. And in the prophet Isaiah, of course, he tells us, a virgin will conceive and bring forth a son, and you'll call him Immanuel, and all the titles of this coming king. Or we could go further back. We could go back 2,000 years before Jesus to Jacob blessing his children and saying to his children that there would come a scepter from the tribe of Judah who would rule over the world and all the nations of the world would come to him. But John beats them all. He turns the clock back past public ministry at Jordan, past Bethlehem, past Isaiah's day, past Jacob's day, right back to the very beginning. He goes back to creation. He goes back to the very beginning of all things. And he tells us what happened in the beginning. Now, let me just say a thing about this book of John. This is John's account, as I say, of Jesus. And he's very straightforward in what he wants to do in his book. He tells us at the end of the book exactly why he's written it in the first place. So that you are under no illusions why I'm preaching this morning or why John wrote, let me read to you what he says. Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in His name. So let me be absolutely open. My card's on the table. We want you to have eternal life. We want you to believe. We want you to know what is taught in the Bible about Jesus the Messiah and the Son of God. And we want you to know that we believe those things by the kind of material that John presents us with in this book. This is an eyewitness account. C.S. Lewis at one time looked at the Gospels and answered the challenge of those critics that say that it's myth or story. And he wrote this, I've been reading poems and romances, vision literature, legends and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that this is not one of them. This is a record of eyewitness testimony. John knew Jesus. He knew him personally. John knew that Jesus was no ghost or apparition or a divine being pretending to be human or an alien. He was a real person. John had been there and seen him cry real tears at the graveside of a dearly loved friend. Jesus is not ashamed of your tears. He had been there and seen Jesus rage with anger at the very presence of death He had seen Jesus move with compassion and love towards people in their need. John had taken Jesus' mother home and looked after her to her great old age. If John had wanted to, John could have told us many stories about Jesus growing up. What he was like as a child. What he did as a baby. What he did as a young man, as a teenager. What he did as a young man learning his trade as a carpenter. But it doesn't tell us any of those things. All of those things which we would like to know the answers to, none of the Gospel writers are interested in telling us anything about those things. John is not interested in any of that, though it would have made a good story. No, he tells us right at the very beginning about Jesus before Bethlehem. Even before creation. And it wasn't as if John had started off thinking of Jesus like this, like the rest of them. They were impressed with Him. They were moved by Him. They followed Him, but they didn't think of Him as God. They were Jews, for goodness sake. They didn't believe in God being something human, something tangible, something material. They believed in God the One. God the transcendent. God the above and beyond. But the clues. All began to make sense when John met Jesus alive after his Passion. John had been there. He had seen Jesus die. John had seen the soldiers come and pierce his pericardium and clot and serum pour out looking to the untrained eye like blood and water. Jesus was dead as dead could be. And John had been there early in that morning when Jesus' tomb was empty. John was the one who saw the undisturbed grave clothes signaling the disappearance of the body. Not the evidence of grave robbers. And the resurrection changed everything. That's why though many of us in this room today are grieving, we don't grieve as those who have no hope. The resurrection changes everything. And changed how John looked at Jesus. I've started at the end of the story so that when we get to this this morning you understand the significance of what we are reading when we read these words. Later on, John's going to say in this chapter, in verse 14, an explanation of what is happening in Jesus Christ from this eternal perspective, the Word became flesh. That's an amazing thing. There's the story of Christmas. The Son of God becomes a baby. God becomes human. It's a mystery. We can't wrap our heads around it. We no more understand it than you do. But it's there. That's the story. Great indeed is the mystery of godliness. God becomes a baby. It remains unfathomable, even to the brightest and best of all of us. John introduces Jesus at the beginning, not by His name, but by this description, the Word. And I wanted to walk through this with you this morning. I was going to say briefly, but you wouldn't believe me. First of all, the word and time. Do you notice how John introduces him? In the beginning was the word. Now there's a lot of discussion about what the word means, and of course I'm going to note later that the word Behind this word in English is the word logos and there was a lot of discussion and debate in the Greek philosophical world about the use of this language. But I want you to notice that John immediately in the beginning tells us exactly where he's getting this word, the word from. He echoes the language of Genesis chapter one, the Torah that would immediately alert anybody who was a Jew reading this. to the book of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And in Genesis and in John, the beginning is absolute. It is the beginning of beginnings. It's the beginning of the universe. It points to a time beyond creation. At the time everything began, there was the Word. Everything else was going to begin, but the Word was there. before the beginning. John is pushing us back, back, further back. Back before the beginning of absolutely everything. Now I know that in the scientific world there have been times where there was a denial that there was ever a beginning to the universe. When I was growing up we were taught that science looked at the universe as a steady state that had eternally existed. And then things changed in the scientific community until relatively recently there was the view of a Big Bang, a definite beginning to the universe. That's in dispute in the scientific world today, but there are still some outstanding advocates of that, Stephen Hawking being one who says almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang. One scientist, Francis Collins, puts it like this in layman's language. He says we have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. The universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that there was nothing. I cannot imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe at the beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature. Now, you don't have to believe everything the scientist says, but I do think what we have to recognize as we look at the universe is that it is a contingent universe. That is, that everything in our universe is full of contingencies. All of them have a cause outside of themselves. A baby has a cause outside of itself. Parents who conceived the baby Our survival is dependent on outside factors. That there's enough oxygen mixed into our atmosphere for us to breathe, and food for us to eat, and other people to care for us. Well, I think we can be agnostic about scientific speculation, but as Christians we're required to be certain about divine revelation. And here's divine revelation. We're being told here that before there was anything created, there was the Word, the Son of God. And you can go way back into the very earliest mists of time in Christian history, back to the early fathers, and you'll find that they worshipped Him from the very beginning as one who was before all time or before all ages, preexistent. He had always been. The Word was there in the beginning. So there's the Word in time. He's before time. Outside of time. Then secondly, the Word in God. He has something to say about this. If you go back before creation, before there are things, before there's anything, and we're all things, and this building is a thing, and the planet we're on is a thing, and the universe we're in is a thing. Before there are things, what is there? Well, there's God. So where is the Word? Well, the Word's there with God when there's nothing else but God. In the beginning, God. What does he say about the Word and God? He says, first of all, the Word was with God. He's very careful in the way he constructs the sentence here because he doesn't want to give you the wrong impression. He doesn't want you to understand for one minute that God is the Word. That would say, that all there is to God is the Word. But he wants to say more than that. So he doesn't put it that way. He says the Word was with God. It's a lovely picture. A picture of two people face to face in a relationship. The idea of lovers running towards each other when they see each other. Running towards one another with a view to embracing one another. They see each other. And in that look, in that capture of that look, There is affection. There's intimacy. There's relationship. That's behind this word. The word was face to face with God. There was no dropped eye. No embarrassment. There was eye contact. There was relationship. Intimate relationship. There's distinction. The word was with God. And as we'll see, there's also connection and identity and identification. But here the emphasis is on giving us this point. Not only is he God, as he's going on to say, but he is with God. And of course, this idea of God consisting of three centers of consciousness, God being one in essence and yet being three persons, was the raw material that led the church to affirm the Trinity. That God is one in three, three in one. And that we can't think of the three without thinking of the one, and think of the one without thinking of the three. This is some of the raw material to build up that picture. But it's a lovely picture. The picture is that before there was a universe, before there were sentient beings like you and I, at the heart of everything there is this essence, this unity, this relationship. A perfect, beautiful relationship. A perfect love. Jesus talks about this in John 17. He says one day He wants you and I to experience the kind of love that the Father and the Son enjoyed before the creation of the world. He wants us to enjoy that relationship as well. Sometimes in life you get a glimpse of it, don't you? You get a glimpse. In that special friendship, in that special love that exists between two people or between a group of people and someone that they have great affection for, you get glimpses of that kind of special relationship. But it's perfect here. Before all worlds. Jesus prays in John 17 to His Father. It's my favorite part of the Bible. He says, He prays you. Remember, He refers to the glory I had with you before the world was. Father and Son, face to face, perfect relationship. Not only that, but there's more to it than that, of course. They're not only with each other, they're indwelling each other. And the rest of John is going to tell us that. That though they're distinct, that they also mutually indwell. And if you're saying to yourself, I have no idea now what you're talking about, fine. Join the greatest theologians. They don't either. But we have to tell you what's there. Here's what's here. Jesus, on one occasion, Put it like this in John 14, believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Father dwells in the Son, the Son dwells in the Father. I may not understand what that means, but it means they're inseparable, it means that they are one. And it means this, John goes on to say, the Word was God. You, a Jehovah's Witness friend, will point out to you that the Word God has no article. and will argue that what he's saying here is the word had godness, small g. It was a divine being and that's all there is. Of course, what they don't tell you is that that proves nothing since there are many places in the New Testament where the predicate noun has no article and is yet specific. Memorize that line and tell them that next time they come to your door. I'm not sure I can even repeat it. In fact, the words are arranged in order to emphasize the word God. In other words, God is the climax of the sentence. The word was God. It's meant to shock you. It's meant to shake you. It's meant to startle you. The word was God. It's certainly meant to prevent you from saying, because if you did put the article in, you could very easily translate it. God was the word. And that wouldn't tell you anything Christian at all. Edmund Clowney put it like this, The Word was with God, God's eternal fellow. The Word was God, God's own self. You don't get any more straightforward than that. But the Word who became flesh at Bethlehem and the One who was made sin with our sin on the cross is God. God the Word. God the Son. This is the universal claim of Christianity. We sing about it at Christmas time over and over again. True God of true gods. Light of light eternal. Our God contracted to a span. Incomprehensibly made man. It's the Christmas message. And as you read the Gospels, as you reflect on His birth, As you watch His healing people and helping people and listening to His teaching, and as you see Him rejected by His own people, as you see Him suffering agonies on the cross for your sin, as you're startled by news of His resurrection, you are learning about God as much as about Jesus. And it was His claim to be God that got Him killed. John tells us this in chapter 10 verse 33. It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God. The religious man has understood that. His own disciples didn't. Till nearly the end of his life, nearly his arrest, and he's having to say to them, guys, I and the Father are one. Have you not got that yet? If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. No one can see God because God isn't physical. But if you've seen me, you've seen God. God is giving us this great introduction to Jesus by making us face up to the Christian claim. Thirdly, the word and creation. Immediately, he comes on to that, doesn't he, from verses 2 and 3. John Calvin writes, Having declared that the Word is God and proclaimed his divine essence, he goes on to prove his divinity from his works. So you're someone who claims to be an intellectual and an academic, so what do you do? You go and see what they've written. You go and check out the evidences that are there in writing of their intellectual and academic ability. Well, where do we look for evidence that Jesus is God? Well, the answer is we look at his work. And John begins with the greatest work of them all. He works his way backwards, back before the beginning. And he reminds us of this in verse 2. He was in the beginning with God and then he spills the beans. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. And again, the Greek construction here is amazing. He's saying this, when he says, without him not anything made, the positive side of that is everything owes its existence to the Word. In fact, the Greek is even more helpful here. Not only did everything owe its existence in the beginning to the Word who made it, but even now, even now the continuing existence of things. is due to the Word. It's not just that back in the beginning He did it, but that today the fact that you are here, that this building exists, that this desk is real and that this floor will not collapse under my feet when I thump it. and that you can hear my voice. The fact that we exist in this planet, this morning in this place, is due to the fact that everything exists permanently because of the Word who made it and sustains it. It's an amazing truth. In Him we live and move and have our being. Now, you see what he says. The Word is therefore the agent of creation. He is the agent of creation. Secondly, it means the Word is apart from creation. There's a little repetition here, and you wonder why it's being repeated, but look at it again. He says, first of all, all things were made through Him. Straightforward. Then he goes on and he repeats himself. And without Him was not anything made that was made. Why does he do that? He wants to emphasize this to you. He wants to emphasize that Jesus, the Word, the Son of God, second person of the Trinity, he wants you to understand that there are these made things. Here we are sitting in this room and we are all made things. But that Jesus is not one of those things. There is nothing that has been made that he didn't make. Including himself. But he couldn't make himself. He is not one of the made things. He is not a creature. He is not a creation. He is apart from creation. He's making it absolutely crystal clear, in other words, that anything in the category of made does not apply to him. You get that? He's repeating himself here, just as I am. Lo, within the manger lies He who built the starry skies. He is apart from creation. I'll tell you another thing. This is very important for us. He approves, the word approves of creation. John is actually breaking away from a popular philosophy that was on the increase in the ancient world known as Gnosticism. And just, I think it was last Christmas, I was speaking in London. I was speaking in a famous church called the Temple Church, which is in an area of the city of London where all the barristers and the top lawyers live and move and have their being. Network and so on and the temple church is the lawyers church and I was preaching to about five or six hundred lawyers for their Christmas service and managed to escape without any litigation and I Didn't offend anybody that day and which is unusual But interestingly the interesting thing about a temple church. I'll get to the story the reason it's famous is that you'll have seen it if you've ever seen the movie the Da Vinci Code and because they use, it's in the book, it's also in the movie, the Temple Church in London, they use it to kind of convey this Gnostic idea. They raise the word Gnostic without ever at any point in the book or in the movie explaining what the word Gnostic indicates. Many of these Gnostic Christians in the early church had no problem whatsoever with saying Jesus was God. Their problem was in believing that Jesus had flesh. That there was anything material about Jesus. Because they believed that matter was evil. And so John is smashing this idea. He is saying that at creation it was God, through the Word, that made everything. Not some anti-God, as the Gnostics said. But God in his Son made all things. Creation has been made by a good God for good ends and can be appreciated and enjoyed in all its parts. So you and I can earn money, savour food, appreciate wine, enjoy sunsets, sing love songs, embrace friends with glad and thankful heart because creation is a good thing because Jesus made it. But there's one last thing that I think is an implication from the passage that I want to speak about for a moment before we close. John, like the rest of the early Christians, is wondering at who Jesus is, just in worship and wonder. And I think of Paul writing to the Colossians when he says, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Worship is one response. But here's the fourth thing that I want to talk about this morning. The Word and time, before all time. The Word and God, with God. He is God. The Word and creation, He made everything. Fourthly, the Word and meaning. You see, this introduction is telling us something quite revolutionary about God, using the language of analogy. The Bible doesn't really tell us much about what God is in and of himself. That's his essence. But it does tell us things that God has revealed for us to kind of understand what he is like. And he uses language, he uses metaphor, he uses words in order to convey to us what is actually unimaginable and inconceivable to our human minds. And here, using the language of analogy, the father is described as the speaker, the son is described as the speech, and the spirit is described as the breath. In the pulpit this morning, there's a speaker and there's speech, which you're hearing. Those of you who are still awake. And if you were close enough, there's breath that would spray you. That's why we have a distance between me and the first people here. They don't want me baptized over and over again every time they come to church. Now, this is important. This is important, this idea of God's communication. I mentioned earlier in the sermon that the basis for the use of this word, word, have been speculated about. For example, the word logos behind our English word for word. It was used by a man called Philo, for example. He spoke about the Logos as the primal man or the ideal man. But Philo's Logos had no distinct personality of his own and certainly never became incarnate. That is, never became enfleshed, never took on flesh. And I said earlier, and I say again, the most obvious clue to the meaning and use of the word is there in the text itself. The quotation of Genesis 1. God created the world by speaking. Genesis says, God said, let there be light, and there was light. God communicates. The eternal word in John 1.1 is related to the other uses of the word in the Bible, the creational word of God when He spoke and everything comes into being. and the scriptural Word, which is called the Word of God, which we have had read and now preached in our hearing. And there is a relationship in the Bible between the creational Word and the scriptural Word and the eternal Word. The creational Word and the scriptural Word make manifest and accessible the wisdom of God that has its source in the eternal Word. That is Jesus, the Son of God. When John calls Jesus the Word, it's because he knows Jesus is the truth. The truth of God. The truth is in Jesus Himself in such a unified way that His coming, working, teaching, dying, rising is the final and decisive message of God. Or let me put it more simply. What God has to say to us was not only or mainly what Jesus said. But who Jesus was and who Jesus is, he said, I am the truth. Then he could also say to God, your word is truth. There is a relationship. The eternal word speaks the creative word and speaks again through the scriptural word. But you see, John introduces us to Jesus as the Word for another reason, and it's this reason that I've already indicated, and that is that Jesus brings meaning. He makes sense of everything. If He is the Word, you see, if He's the truth, then He's the first, final, ultimate, decisive, absolutely true and reliable Word. He makes sense of everything. Let me just give you one illustration of how he makes sense of everything. The playwright, Arthur Miller, in his book, After the Fall, has his character, Quentin, reflect on the meaninglessness of life. I want to read the quotation from the book. Quentin says, For many years I looked at life like a case of law. It was a series of proofs. When you're young, you prove how brave you are or smart. Then what a good lover, then a good father. Finally, how wise or powerful or whatever. But underlying it all, I see now there was a presumption that one moved on an upward path towards an elevation where, God knows what, I would be justified or condemned. A verdict, anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself. This pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. Which, of course, is another way of saying despair. You see, what Arthur Miller's character is saying is this. We spend our lives trying to prove something to somebody. Even when we're away from the gaze of the people we try to impress, the people we work with, the people we live with, or our friends or whatever, even when we're away from them, even when we're on our own, we're driven by Somehow or other trying to measure up or impress somebody somewhere. It makes us faithful when we're on our own. Loyal. It keeps us on the right track. It keeps us going. It gives us something to get up for in the morning. And what he's saying is that Quentin Wakehoff wakes up one day and he thinks, well, why? Why do I do this when nobody else is looking? Nobody sees. At the end of my life, there's no one who's going to say, well, you did OK. You know, you weren't the best, but you were OK. As a father, as a mother, as a person who has reached maturity, as a single person with integrity, you've done OK. Or you've really done badly. There's no one to say anything. There is an empty bench, no judge in sight, just an endless argument with oneself. The pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. Here's what Jesus says. This one that we've been discussing this morning. Later in John's Gospel we'll say this, all judgment has been given to me by my Father. There is someone on the bench. There is someone who will either justify or judge every one of us, pardon or condemn. There is someone that sees me when I'm on my own. There is someone to whom all of my life is important. Who knows the ups and downs of my experience? The good and the bad. There is all mixed up in here. And it's this Word, the One who makes sense of everything. Now, you may not be a Christian. Let me say to you, you don't have to believe what I'm saying this morning. You'll get out of here and nobody will assault you, tackle you, bring you down on the steps. We're cool. But there's coming a day when everybody in this room will stand before the judge. They will stand before that judge and on that day, you see, on that day, God will respect your disbelief. There will be no one in heaven who does not want to be there. There will be no one in the presence of God for all eternity who will not be happy being there. You must choose. There's a temptation at Christmas to focus on the baby, and that's a good thing. It was great for us to be there when our little grandson Samuel was born. Great to be around a baby again. And then hand him back. And go 3,000 miles in the opposite direction. But at Christmas, we have not to concentrate on the baby. We have to concentrate on the fact that this baby existed before all worlds. That's the real miracle. You know, when people say, raise the question, how can it possibly be that Mary had this child conceived in her of the Holy Spirit. That's a miracle. That's beyond our comprehension. Once you know that this word is the word who was with God and was God, the incarnation is like just going and getting milk at the grocery store. It's nothing. It's not a good time. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Last Battle. Quotes from Queen Lucy when she says, Yes, in our world too. a stable once held inside of it, something that was bigger than our whole world. The Word was with God. The Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Wow. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the great, amazing, heart-thumping, brain-pounding, life-changing news that at Bethlehem, God the Son became the Son of Man. That sons of men might become sons of God. We pray that we would celebrate this Christmas with clearer minds, stronger voices, greater praises, warmer love. We pray in Jesus' strong name, Amen. A. God is love and love is the way, He will change the face of sin. He's true love and love is the way, God is love and love is the way. God is love. God is with us. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave